Hey guys! It’s been a while since I’ve posted much of note, so I think we’re due for a thought-dump, and it’s actually one I’ve put off for a while because I’m such a fan of proper panhandling that I wanted to delay it as much as possible. That should provide a fair sense of where this is going.

You know how every gosh-darn artist and creative has a Patreon to the point that you’re probably tired of them now? Well, I figure that’s come full circle from being new to being a bandwagon to finally being a thing I can join again without it being a joke, so I’m heavily considering setting one up. Let’s talk about why! It’s exciting!

You may have noticed that, aside from updating with pathetic rarity in recent months, HP as a site has just straight up been down for decent periods of time. This is because real life is a thing, and it affects both me and Travis, who so generously provides my hosting and has for years. While HP isn’t the only site hosted on our little network of sorts, it is a significant chunk of things, and given how things have been in recent months it might be super cool to finally take some of the burden off the poor guy and have the site partially support itself! That would be neat. That’s like a basic benchmark, really.

Aside from that, full 40+ hour work weeks really bite into the sort of time it takes to produce comic pages that take 10-20 hours of work a piece to put out there, even ignoring the sort of time required to keep oneself sane and not live in some sort of hazardous waste condition. Chores are a thing! They must be done! This is adult life! That said, if we could raise enough that I could evade a full work day and instead focus that on my unholy craft, that opens up a lot of time that I could use for little things like, say, making comic updates or pursuing my awesome side project.

Those are the hopes. Those are the things. But there’s a little hinderence with regards to what exactly I’m going to raise cash for – rather, what you guys would deem worth spewing money at me over. To that end, I’ve considered some options:

Per-Page Campaign:
These are pretty common with webcomics, and you know exactly what you’re paying for; in this case, for every page of HP I put out, whatever you guys pledge comes to me as income. (Pledges can be capped, so I can’t put out 10 pages in a week and rob you blind, which is pretty smart of the people in charge, to be honest.) I would only do this for HP! I know Lonely has its fans, but it’s a fan work and I don’t feel comfortable raising money for its creation; it remains a free-time only passion project (it’s not dead, either, I promise!), and save possibly some future print offerings it will remain as such.

Monthly Campaign:
This covers all the garbage I do, like a general “go for it” vote of faith. I feel like, with my work in particular, this simultaniously suits my goals better, but also is less likely to work out as I sink months into a bizarre shooter half of you probably won’t even care about. This option, consequently, is sort of losing, despite being heavenly, because the whole idea here is that you all get something out of it.

“Yeah okay, so on that…”

Rewards, I know! I’ve given this a lot of pondering, too, so here’s where I’m at:

In-Progress Page Postings
Patreon makes this super easy with the feed; basically, for whatever base amount, I can let you guys in on the step-by-step process of pages, not only letting you see the magic happen, but potentially letting you see pages well before their proper posting, so you can gloat about it to your friends or whatever. (You’ve shown your friends HP, right?) Patreons also tend to offer private backer-only streams, which I am completely down with doing.

Sketch Stream Reservations
I’d probably limit how many of these I can do, but basically this one’s two-fold: I’d love to get back into weekend sketch streams, and this would let you nab a guaranteed place on the roster, say, once a month, just as part of the pledge goal. I say I’d limit these because I only do so many sketches per session, and also I’d like to give non-backers at least a vague chance of getting in on things, maybe. We’ll see.

Early Game Builds
This favors the “per month” option a bit more, but my happy aside project I’ve been mostly consumed with since September or so is a curtain fire game that would totes love a little user feedback from time to time; to that end, this is almost like a you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-yours scenario, I suppose. Barring the monthly option, I’ll probably just offer this at whatever level of per-page tier. It’s my present baby and I hope you’ll all love it once things are properly moving.

Discounts / Gimmes
There’d be different tiers here, probably, and this is tied to another project I need to undertake called “drastically updating the store,” but backers of certain tiers could get discount / promo codes for special sales, or (as an example) be guaranteed a copy of any new book or print that comes out, and other such fine things. (I’m not sure if I’d have to limit this by country. We’re just ideas around here; I’d have to look into it a bit more.)

The Old Monthly Wallpaper
Remember these? I did monthly wallpapers for about half a year as an experiment. This would probably be one of the lower tiers, if not baseline, but I wouldn’t mind bringing it back if people are interested!

Those are my present ideas. I’m open to feedback on the matter of all sorts, so let me know!

As for general updates:

The next chapter of SoT remains at about the halfway marker on thumbs; I’ve not been looking at it a lot, as I’ve been thinking about where things stand and how I’m going to move forward. (This whole post is sort of the result of some of that, truth be told.) I’ve recently began chipping away at it again, but am juggling it with a rather hefty commission “piece” that’s on a bit of a time crunch.

Lonely is sitting around in my head being a great story I wish I had more time to actually tell, but it’s not going anywhere so don’t fret that nonsense. My glorious passion project on the side of both of those has been waiting on a couple fronts, but I think I’ve a solution to one of them. Also, look forward to another bad attempt at hand-drawn spriting soon, because I’ve been whittling at one of those again too. Good golly.

Next goal: hearing feedback on this, working out a schedule again that’s not insane. Wish me luck.

Guys, you like knowing when to expect more weird magical rodent noise, and I like being lazy. Today we both win, because I needed to write up a DA journal thing anyway, so I went ahead and just put it all there.

Whazzat? You didn’t know I had a DA? Well, how fortuitous. Now you can follow me and all my delightful doings over yonder as well. They don’t get a lot of what goes on here, though. Oh no. You guys are special.

The next chapter is about halfish scripted and laid out at this point. I’m trying a different approach with this one, but that works out okay for me because I’m juggling a fair smidge at this point in time.

And, since it came up on DA, with regards to prints and con prep, anything you’re all dying for? I’ve no sense for these things.

Been a couple weeks since the end of Light & Darkness, so I thought I’d fill y’all in on what I’ve been up to.

First off, we have my latest remix, this time of Eurobeat Brony’s “Batty”. This one’s been doing really well, and even got an EQD spot! So that’s rather cool.

There’s also “Moonlit Razi”, a somewhat sultry piece done up of one of my fiancé’s RP characters from her own attempt at offshooting Legends. Both of these are dead, but there’s strangely synchronous whisperings and chatter, things stirring, something trying to happen. I’m hoping something comes of that, but in the meantime there’s a mouse bein’ sexy or whatever. It’s nothing practically outside of HP’s normal bounds, but it is decidedly meant to be a bit more risqué, and for that reason I choose to keep it linked over embedded. It’s a weird line, but a line all the same.

That was a super productive week one, which would be followed up by weird exhaustion leading into super exciting illness. This last week leaves little to show on account of that, but through my muddled exhaustion I can say I’ve gotten out something, sort of.

Yup, I’m trying this again. It’s not a priority project, but it suited my mental state pretty well.

My goals this week are to try and get some commission work going before I get back into the full swing of chapters again, but I do hope to put a considerable dent in writing out the next chapter in the process. It’s a doozy and I’ve been teasing it for ages, but for now I’ll say the interlude occurred for a narrative reason, and we’ll be returning at long last to the core group of our little story for a good while. What happened after the events at the arena? You’ll finally get to find out, albeit in the usual demented manner where I never just up and tell you as soon as you’d like. I’m cruel like that.

I’ll keep you guys posted as things develop, but in the meanwhile, Maiz just started chapter 6, and I’ve long been saying that if you guys like HP, you’ll probably enjoy Maiz as well. Give it a shot?

Hey guys! Apologies for no page this week. I checked out Terraria’s Halloween update, and then Katie decided to check out Terraria in general, and then there were wars over the computer and who got to play Terraria. My version of warfare is “meh I’ll play Tales wait LM HAS A FLAME SWORD AND A POWER DRILL?” and then sobbing in the corner of the office because I work all the hours, mind, but… we’re straying from the matter at hand here.

I was not able to get a page of SoT beyond the planning and scripting stages, but I did have the next page of Lonely like half done, so I wrapped that up instead. If you’re into that weird little mess of a fanfic I’m slowly doing, you can find that right here.

Anyway, hopefully now that the initial fascination is over I can try and get both my own wanting to play and my girlfriend’s in check this week so next Monday will see things getting back to normal. Alternatively, I would love to get going on making myself a diamond pickaxe.

Hey guys! It’s been a couple weeks since anything happened, and I figure I should let you all know I don’t just really, really want you to dwell on this page forever.

Last week sort of wound up being a vacation of sorts; I’d forgotten it was the weekend we had plans to be away from home until about Wednesday, at which point I stared at a blank page and laughed and played more Tales of Graces. This week has been the start of prep for Rose City Comicon! How exciting! I’ve designed some new buttons that aren‘t ponies (hint: “your vassals are my vassals”) and Katie is hard at work on restocking some favorite trolls.

The general plan right now is that things will be fairly quiet until possibly October, though I may sneak a page in before then, as we’re trying to get everything rightly sorted for the show. We’re a proper vendor across from a six table collective and we are quite rightly intimidated out of our minds. It’s scary!